Want to know how your MP has been voting in the House of Commons? Finding out has just become a whole lot easier.

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff votes for his budget amendment in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Feb 2, 2009.

By:Alexander PanettaTHE CANADIAN PRESS, Published on Fri Apr 17 2009

OTTAWA–Want to know how your MP has been voting in the House of Commons? Finding out has just become a whole lot easier.

The House of Commons website has launched a feature that allows visitors to see how MPs voted.

Friday's change brings Canadian transparency one step closer to the U.S. – where Congress regularly posts voting results within an hour, and has detailed records going back 20 years.

Unlike the U.S., Canada's parliamentary system usually results in MPs toeing a party line, so votes in the Commons tend to be far less dramatic than in Congress.

But MPs are sometimes allowed by their party leaders to vote freely on matters of conscience, non-binding resolutions that express the will of Parliament, or on bills not deemed matters of confidence.

The new changes will allow viewers four different ways to access MPs' voting records through the parliamentary website (www.parl.gc.ca.) One of those methods was launched Friday; the rest will be up next week.

To view an MP's record, head to the website and click on the Members of Parliament link to find your member of the House of Commons. Your MP's site will will have a tab for votes that takes you to a list showing whether they voted yea, nea, or didn't vote at all on any given bill.

It gets a little trickier if you want to figure out what each bill actually means: you'd have to click on the link to the individual vote and bill, then at the very least go through its summary for a description of it.

For example, if you clicked on the link for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the MP for Calgary-Southwest, and clicked on the Votes tab there, you would see that he last voted in the Commons on March 25.

That day Harper voted in favour of C-9, a bill to amend the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act.

The summary of the bill outlines its goal of strengthening transportation safety regulations, and the text goes into far more detail about how C-9 will change the existing federal law.

Or, if you click on the Today in the House link on the Parliamentary website and then on Votes on the left side of the page, you can search and navigate to lists of how all MPs voted on particular bills or dates.

It was the NDP that began pushing for the website changes last year.

MP Libby Davies sent House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken a letter bemoaning the lack of transparency in Parliament.

She noted that Americans could, for instance, see that Barack Obama missed 37.4 per cent of votes in the U.S. Senate, and voted in line with the Democrats 96.7 per cent of the time.

"Each of us finds signs of growing voter disengagement – like declining turnout in elections – worrisome," Davies wrote to Milliken in March 2008.

"And each of us desire to find ways of opening the House and its deliberations to greater public interest and knowledge. . . Compiling and presenting these records on the public Internet site is a rather modest, yet at the same time critically important, step in modernizing the relationship between Canadians and their members of Parliament."

Commons technical staff began working on the design, and the chamber's board of internal economy agreed at a meeting last month to launch the feature.

Starting next week, the website will also include a search engine that allows people to see how MPs have voted since October 2004.

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